The Psychology of The Paranormal - Carl Jung

Since early childhood, Carl Jung  experienced paranormal phenomena, that is, phenomena that are beyond the scope  of scientific understanding. As a child, he continually heard stories of uncanny happenings  such as “dreams which foresaw the death of a certain person, clocks which stopped at the moment  of death, glasses which shattered at the critical moment. ” The reality of these events, he says, was  “taken for granted in the world of my childhood.

” Jung’s personal experiences with the paranormal  would set him on a quest to find an explanation of these events with his theory of analytical  psychology, as well as sparking his interest in parapsychology, the study of psychic or  paranormal phenomena, especially regarding extrasensory perception or ESP (precognition,  clairvoyance, telepathy, intuition, etc). Paranormal experiences were virtually commonplace  in Jung’s family. His maternal grandfather, Rev.

Samuel Preiswerk, who had learned Hebrew  because he believed it was spoken in heaven, found himself continually surrounded by ghosts and  would devote one day every week to conversing with the spirit of his deceased first wife, keeping a  chair for her in his study – much to the dismay of his second wife Augusta Preiswerk (Jung’s  maternal grandmother). Augusta was clairvoyant and a spirit-seer. This gift is traced back  to an event that she had at the age of 20, where she fell into a coma for 36 hours.

She  would sometimes see apparitions of persons unknown to her, but whose historical existence  was later proved. Augusta is credited with bringing “the Occult strain” into the family. Jung’s mother, Emilie Preiswerk, also experienced “strange occurrences” with sufficient regularity  to write a diary exclusively dedicated to them.

Her father, Samuel, insisted that she sit  behind him when he was writing his sermons, as spirits were disturbing him. Emilie spent  much of the time in her own separate bedroom, enthralled by the spirits that  she said visited her at night. Jung described his mother as having two  personalities.

At day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed mysterious and  terrified Jung. Unlike Jung’s father, who was more predictable. Both his mother and  father were the 13th children of their families.

Jung writes of a childhood experience: “From the door to my mother’s room came frightening influences. At night Mother was  strange and mysterious. One night I saw coming from her door a faintly luminous, indefinite  figure whose head detached itself from the neck and floated along in front of it, in the  air, like a little moon.

Immediately another head was produced and again detached itself.  This process was repeated six or seven times. ” As a young assistant physician at Burghölzli in  Zürich, Jung was working on his word association experiments.

One day, his mother came to visit  him, and looked at the whole room which was plastered with graphs. She looked confused and  asked him what it was about. Jung replied that they were they for his experiments.

Then  she said with her “second” voice, “Well, do you think it could be something? ” Jung stated: “My mother rarely spoke in this tone – but when she did, she would intuitively and unexpectedly  say something of great significance… Her question affected me so much that I  could not lift a pen for the next three weeks. Her words had unflinchingly exposed my own  doubts about the importance of my undertaking, and now I asked myself in all seriousness  whether what I was doing really made sense.

” Just like his mother and grandmother, Jung  had also described himself as having a dual personality, which he called personality No. 1  (aimed at social integration), and personality No. 2, which was ancient, deeply knowledgeable,  and “close to nature, to the night, to dreams, and to whatever God worked directly in him.

” When Jung was studying at home one morning in 1898, he was surprised by a sudden loud crack.  He found that a heavy walnut table that had been in his family for generations had split right  across. Two weeks later, he heard another sound.

This time he saw that inside the cupboard, the  bread knife which had been used just an hour ago had been broken into four pieces for no apparent  reason. Jung decided to keep these as a reminder of the powerful forces of the unseen realm. They  are still in the possession of the Jung family.

Jung’s own account presents these incidents  as connected with séances (an attempt to communicate with spirits) which he claims he  started attending a few weeks later, but which in fact he had already been attending for several  years. The table had been used in these sessions, in his own home, the medium was his cousin Helene  Preiswerk, and his participants, members of his own family. In addition, a number of spirits  with which the medium was in communication with, were none other than Jung’s ancestors.

When he was an undergraduate, Jung discussed the occult and the esoteric in a  student club (known as the Zofingia lectures), including the existence of the soul, the reality  of spirits, psychokinesis, messages from the dead, hypnotism, clairvoyance and precognitive dreams.  A scientific explanation of these is doomed to failure so long as it is based on the principle  of causality. After all, how can an event in the future be the cause of a dream that is taking  place in the present, so that it reflects itself and is anticipated in it?

How can a man dying  in New York cause a person somewhere in Europe to have a premonition of his death, let alone  cause a clock to stop or a glass to shatter? For the thinking of Western man, it is  insuperably difficult to give up the principle of causality – and to accept the reality  of acausal connections, as has been done in the East for millennia, with, for example, the ancient  Chinese oracle of the I Ching – which Jung was greatly fascinated by. Jung used the I Ching in  critical situations of his life and his patients, finding a great deal of meaningful answers  and unusual psychological insights from it.

He could write all 64 hexagrams from memory  and considered them as readable archetypes. Jung continued to attend séances and conducted  a series of experiments with mediums in which he witnessed materialisation, the creation or  appearance of matter from unknown sources, as well as dematerialisation. Jung stated, “I  have seen enough of this phenomenon to convince me entirely of its existence.

” He also witnessed  levitation on several occasions. He writes: “The most striking cases of levitation which  I have witnessed have been with Mr Home. On three separate occasions have I seen him  raised completely from the floor of the room.

Once sitting in an easy chair, once  kneeling on his chair, and once standing up. On each occasion I had full opportunity  of watching the occurrence as it was taking place. There are at least a hundred recorded  instances of Mr Home’s rising from the ground, in the presence of as many separate persons…  To reject the recorded evidence on this subject is to reject all human testimony whatever.

” At one séance, four of the five people present saw an object like a small moon floating above  the abdomen of the medium. It was absolutely incomprehensible to them that Jung, the fifth  person, could see nothing of the sort, although they repeatedly pointed out to him exactly where  it was. From this, Jung inferred the possibility of collective visions on such and other occasions  – for instance, the sightings of flying saucers.

Jung’s observations at these séances formed the  basis of his doctoral dissertation published in 1902, entitled On the Psychology and Pathology  of So-Called Occult Phenomena, which is included in in Volume 1 of the Collected Works, Psychiatric  Studies. The desire to present his findings in an objective light is undoubtedly why this  as well as his various subsequent accounts all conceal to various degrees the full extent of  his personal involvement. Jung always considered himself first and foremost as an empiricist. 

He was also fully aware that the spiritualistic scene was populated with charlatans. Jung admits that his period of the séances with his medium cousin contained the  origin of all his ideas. He had discovered some objective facts about the human psyche.

Jung  was intrigued by how she manifested a completely different personality than her own while in  the trance. This ability to manifest a variety of seemingly autonomous personalities would  contribute to Jung’s formulation of complexes and archetypes. From then on, Jung got his first  glimpse of the fact that there was another world (the unconscious) which had a life of its own  quite apart from the life of consciousness.

In a letter, Jung writes about the troubles  of understanding ghostly communication: “Unfortunately, there are no cases on record  where spirits had the good grace to present themselves as test-persons. Whatever else we can  produce as spirit voices are those of mediums, and there the great trouble is to establish  whether the communicated contents derive from the ghosts or from unconscious fantasies of the medium  or of any other member of the circle. I would not go so far as to deny the possibility that a  medium can transmit a ghostly communication, but I don’t know in which way one can prove it, as  such a proof is outside of our human possibility… This whole question of so-called “occult  phenomena” is nothing one could be naïve about.

It is an awful challenge for the human mind. ” When Jung became a follower of Freud, he continued to study the paranormal. Freud rejected the  subject and was dismissive, for he wanted to make the sexual theory “a dogma, an unshakable bulwark  against the black tide of mud of occultism.

” Later, however, Freud wrote in a letter  to Jung “In matters of occultism, I have grown humble… my hubris has been  shattered. ” Still, he did not want to expose the full extent of his interest publicly. On one occasion in 1909, Jung was having an argument about paranormal phenomena with Freud. 

Earlier in the evening Freud had formally adopted Jung as an eldest son, anointing him as his  successor and crown prince. During the talk, Jung had a strange sensation, as if his diaphragm  were made of iron and were becoming red-hot, and then suddenly there came a loud noise from  the bookcase. Jung said that here was an example of a “catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon,”  or psychokinesis.

Freud dismissed this as “sheer bosh,” to which Jung replied  that there would soon be a sequel, whereupon there was another loud noise from the  same direction. Freud only stared aghast at Jung. In 1961, the year of his  death, Jung wrote in a letter: “I have seen objects moving that were not  directly touched, and moreover under absolutely satisfactory scientific conditions.

One could  describe these movements as levitation, if one assumes that the objects moved by themselves.  But this does not seem to be the case, since all the objects that apparently moved by themselves  moved as though lifted, shaken, or thrown by a hand. In this series of experiments, I, together  with other observers, saw a hand and felt its pressure – apparently the hand that caused all the  other phenomena of this kind.

The phenomena have nothing to do with the “will,” since they occurred  only when the medium was in a trance and precisely not in control of his will. They seem to fall  into the category of poltergeist manifestations. ” Jung’s disagreements with Freud on the paranormal  would contribute to their split.

During this time, Jung entered the period of his “confrontation  with the unconscious”, where he would have visionary or altered states of consciousness and  communicate with his inner figures—forming the basis of his personal journals, the Black  Books, and subsequently, the Red Book. One of these figures was Philemon, a pagan with  an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere and a Gnostic appearance, who represented “superior insight”,  and communicated that there are things in the psyche which one does not produce, but which  produce themselves and have their own life. One of the earliest experiences Jung mentions  of a synchronicity or meaningful coincidence concerns this figure: Philemon had appeared in  his dreams with kingfisher’s wings, and Jung, in order to understand the image better,  did a painting of it.

While engaged on this, he happened to find in his garden, for the  first and only time, a dead kingfisher. It was Einstein, who was Jung’s guest on  several occasions at dinner, who started him off thinking about a possible relativity of time  as well as space, and them being conditioned by the psyche. For Jung, parapsychology shows that  the psyche has an aspect of a relative-temporal and relative-spatial character.

This led,  decades later, to Jung’s relation with the Nobel prize-winning physicist Wolfgang  Pauli and to Jung’s theory of synchronicity. In investigating quantum mechanics, physics  has also been confronted with the problem of acausality and the relativity of spacetime.  This is analogous to synchronicity.

Jung writes: “[Synchronicity] ascribes to the moving body a  certain psychoid property [psychic and physical in nature] which, like space, time and causality,  forms a criterion of its behaviour. We must completely give up the idea of the psyche’s being  somehow connected with the brain, and remember instead the “meaningful” or “intelligent”  behaviour of the lower organisms, which are without a brain. Here we find ourselves much  closer to the formal factor which, as I have said, has nothing to do with brain activity.

” As the statement reveals, Jung would have thought little of the focus on neurology and the  brain for explaining psycho-physical realities. ESP appears as a manifestation of the collective  unconscious, which is the same everywhere and at all times. It manifests itself therefore not  only in human beings, but also at the same time in animals and even in physical events through  synchronicity.

Psyche exists in matter and matter exists in psyche. In essence, the unconscious  pervades the environment all around us and is not an encapsulated realm located exclusively  within an individual, as we tend to assume. There is a microcosm-macrocosm relationship. 

To paraphrase the Emerald Tablet, “As above, so below”. This idea is known by many names: the  unus mundus, the One, the pleroma, anima mundi, sympatheia or cosmic sympathy, animism, and so on. There are people, however, that seem to possess a supernatural faculty and are able to make use  of it at will.

But, for Jung, this consists in their already being in, or voluntarily putting  themselves into, a state corresponding to an archetypal constellation. Similarly, the religious  attitude consists in surrendering oneself to God, which psychologically corresponds to a  subordination of the ego to the Self or God-image. Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, Jung  had apocalyptic visions of terrible destruction visiting Europe and rivers of blood; although he  did not know what to make of them at the time, he realised it had been a premonition when the war  broke out.

Similarly, towards the end of his life, he had a disturbing vision of the last fifty  years of mankind, which was never published and only exists in the notes of his daughter.  His colleague Marie Louise von Franz tells us that he had another deathbed vision in which he  stated, “I see enormous stretches devastated, enormous stretches of the earth.  But, thank God not the whole planet.

” During the Second World War, when Jung was  returning from Bollingen by train, he was overpowered by the image of someone drowning.  When he walked home, his daughter’s children told him that the youngest of the boys had almost  drowned, but his older brother had fished him out. This had taken place at exactly the time Jung  had been assailed by that memory in the train.

Jung had another similar experience before a  death in his wife’s family. He dreamt that his wife’s bed was a deep pit with stone walls.  It was a grave.

Then he heard a deep sigh, as if she took her last breath. A figure sat up  in the pit and floated upward, wearing a white gown with black symbols. Jung woke up at three  o’clock in the morning and checked on his wife.

At seven o’clock came the news that a cousin of  his wife had died at three o’clock in the morning. When he visited Ravenna in Italy, Jung experienced  a peculiar vision or mystical experience. The first time, in 1913, he found the tomb of  Roman empress Galla Placidia significant and fascinating.

The second time, twenty years later,  Jung had the same feeling. Once more he fell into a strange mood in the tomb and was deeply  stirred. He was there with an acquaintance, and they went directly from the tomb into  the Baptistery of the Orthodox.

Jung writes: “Here, what struck me first was the  mild blue light that filled the room; yet I did not wonder about this at all. I did not  try to account for its source, and so the wonder of this light without any visible source did  not trouble me. I was somewhat amazed because, in place of the windows I remembered having  seen on my first visit, there were now four great mosaic frescoes of incredible beauty  which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten… The fourth mosaic… was the most impressive of all. 

We looked at this one last. It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking  beneath the waves. We stopped in front of this mosaic for at least twenty minutes and discussed  the original ritual of baptism… Such initiations were often connected with the peril of death and  so served to express the archetypal idea of death and rebirth… I retained the most distinct memory  of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes… I went  to Alinari to buy photographs of the mosaics, but could not find any… When I was back home, I  asked an acquaintance who was going to Ravenna to obtain the pictures for me.

He could not  locate them, for he discovered that the mosaics I had described did not exist… The lady [Toni  Wolff] who had been there with me long refused to believe that what she had “seen with her own  eyes” had not existed… I was able to ascertain that at least the main features of what we both  saw had been the same. This experience in Ravenna is among the most curious events in my life. ” In 1944, Jung achieved a glimpse behind the veil and had a near-death experience.

He  further reflected on the afterlife after the death of Toni Wolff and Emma Jung. Just  before his death, Jung said that Toni had supplied the "fragrance" of his life, while  his wife, Emma, had supplied "the foundation". Jung felt that Toni’s natural tendency was very  down-to-earth, but she became very intellectual and neglected this part of her life.

Jung  contemplated on the theory of reincarnation. If one believes in the possibility of it, the  idea logically follows that those people who are reincarnated did not complete something in their  life that they were meant to do. Jung narrates a dream he had of Toni where she had returned to  life, and was a farmer in the Umbrian countryside in Italy, working the land.

She was tanned  from the sun and had a tremendous vitality, which she never had in reality. He  felt that Toni was closer to the earth, and she could manifest herself better to him  in the sphere of three-dimensional experience. With his wife Emma, on the other hand, he had  a different impression.

He had dreams after her death in which she was working on her studies  of the Holy Grail. She seemed to be further along the spiritual path, and Jung felt a great  detachment or distance from her, as if she was on another level where he couldn’t reach her. In 1916, Jung felt compelled from within to formulate and express what might have been said by  Philemon.

This gave birth to the Septem Sermones ad Mortuos (Seven Sermons of the Dead), a  collection of seven mystical or “Gnostic” texts which Jung published under the pseudonym  Basilides, an early Christian Gnostic teacher. It all began with a restlessness, and an ominous  atmosphere surrounded him. Then his house began to be haunted, and Jung’s 12-year-old daughter  Agathe, who had inherited her grandmother’s psychic abilities, would see ghosts.

Jung writes: “Around five o’clock in the afternoon on Sunday  the front door-bell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day… Everyone  immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting  near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving.

We all simply stared at one another.  The atmosphere was thick, believe me! Then I knew that something had to happen.

The whole house  was filled as if there were a crowd present, crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep  right up to the door, and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe. As for  myself, I was all a-quiver with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is this?

Then  they cried out in chorus, “We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not what we sought. ”  That is the beginning of the Septem Sermones. Then it began to flow out of me, and in the  course of three evenings the thing was written.

As soon as I took up the pen, the whole ghostly  assemblage evaporated. The room quieted and the atmosphere cleared. The haunting was over.

” Jung stated that the discussion with the dead in the Seven Sermons formed the prelude to what  he would subsequently communicate to the world, expressing in germinal form Jung’s most  important ideas: the nature of the unconscious, individuation, archetypes, the  problem of opposites, and the Self. After his encounter with the ghosts, Jung sketched  in his journal the outlines of his first mandala, the Systema Munditotius, which forms a pictorial  cosmology of the vision conveyed in the Sermons. It was published anonymously and shown  at the Eranos conferences.

The mandala portrays the antimonies of the microcosm  within the macrocosm. The figure of Abraxas, the Great Archon in Gnosticism, is depicted here,  who represents the dark antithesis in the depths, the builder of the physical universe, a  world-creator of an ambivalent nature. Sprouting from him we see the tree of life.

The  lower world of Abraxas is characterised by five, the number of natural man (the twice-five rays  of his star). The accompanying animals of the natural world are a devilish monster and a  larva, which signifies death and rebirth. Jung stated that, “From that time  on, the dead have become ever more distinct for me as the voices of the  Unanswered, Unresolved and Unredeemed.

” One element that astonished Jung was the  fact that the dead appeared to know no more than they did when they died, while the  traditional view is that the dead are the possessors of great knowledge. Apparently, the  dead were waiting for the answers of the living. Jung writes: “What is vital here is not just a conviction of the survival of bodily death, but a  view of the significance of human life, conceived as a process of the development of consciousness  that does not stop at the grave—moreover, a process in which the further development of the  dead is dependent on the increase of consciousness of the living.

Within this conception, through  our terrestrial development, we are in fact aiding the postmortem development of the dead. ” When Jung went on a bicycle trip through Italy with a friend in 1911, he had a dream in which  he was in an assemblage of distinguished spirits of earlier centuries. The conversation was  conducted in Latin.

A gentleman with a long, curly wig addressed Jung and asked a difficult  question, the gist of which he could no longer recall after he woke up. Jung understood him, but  did not have a sufficient command of the language to answer him in Latin. Jung felt so profoundly  humiliated by this that the emotion awakened him.

At the very moment of awakening, he thought  of the book he was then working on, Psychology of the Unconscious (later known as Symbols of  Transformation). Jung had such intense inferiority feelings about the unanswered question that he  abandoned the trip and immediately took the train home in order to get back to work. Jung writes: “Not until years later did I understand the dream and my reaction.

The bewigged gentleman was a  kind of ancestral spirit, or spirit of the dead, who had addressed questions to me—in vain! It  was still too soon, I had not yet come so far, but I had an obscure feeling that by working  on my book I would be answering the question that had been asked. It had been asked  by, as it were, my spiritual forefathers, in the hope and expectation that they would learn  what they had not been able to find out during their time on earth, since the answer had first  to be created in the centuries that followed.

” In a foreword to Fanny Moser’s book,  Ghost: False Belief or True? Jung writes: “In this vast and shadowy region, where everything  seems possible and nothing believable, one must oneself have observed many strange happenings  and in addition heard, read; and if possible, tested many stories by examining their witnesses  in order to form an even moderately sure judgment… It looks as thought Kant will be proved right  for a long time to come when he wrote… “Stories of this kind will have at any time only secret  believers, while publicly they are rejected by the prevalent fashion of disbelief. ” He himself  reserved judgment in the following words: “The same ignorance makes me so bold as to absolutely  deny the truth of the various ghost stories, and yet with the common, although queer,  reservation that while I doubt any of them, still I have a certain faith in the whole  of them taken together.

” One could wish that very many of our bigots would take note of  this wise position adopted by a great thinker. ” In this book, appears Jung’s own contribution.  In the summer of 1920, Jung went to England to give some lectures.

He stayed at a cottage at a  very low price for several weekends. At night, the air would become stuffy and there would be  an unpleasant smell in the room. He heard the noise of water dripping, though there was  no running water in the room.

Every night got worse. Things would now brush along  the walls, there were knocking sounds, rustling like the roaring of a storm, and Jung had  a feeling that an animal, about the size of a dog, was rushing in the room in a panic. All of these  activities would cease with the first streak of sunlight.

Jung noticed that the maids never stayed  in the house past sunset. When he asked them whether there was something wrong with the house,  they told him, “It is haunted, didn’t you know? ” On one particular night, Jung had the feeling  that there was something near his bed, and he opened his eyes.

There, beside him on  the pillow, he saw the head of an old woman, and the right eye, wide open, glared at him.  The left half of the face was missing below the eye. The sight of it was so sudden  and unexpected that he leapt out of bed, lit the candle, and spent the rest of the night in  an armchair.

Jung’s friend “Dr X” was sceptical, so Jung convinced him to spend the weekend in the  house. And he had similar experiences and was too afraid to go back, so he slept in the garden.  Shortly afterwards, the house was torn down.

In the spring of 1924, Jung was alone in  the Bollingen Tower. He awoke to the sound of soft footsteps going around the Tower.  Distant music sounded, and he heard voices laughing and talking.

When he looked out  the window, there was nothing. Apparently, he had only been dreaming. Then he fell asleep  again and at once the same dream began.

At the same time, he had a visual image of several  hundred dark-clad figures who had come down from the mountains and were pouring in around the  Tower. Once again Jung jumped out, looked out the window and it was a deathly still moonlit night. In this sort of dream, as opposed to ordinary dreams, the unconscious seems bent on conveying  a powerful impression of reality to the dreamer, an impression which is emphasised by repetition. 

Never again did Jung experience or dream anything similar. Later, Jung read in a 17th century  chronicle about a man who was alone in the mountains and was disturbed one night  by a procession of men close to his hut, who played music and sang. The man inquired about  this to a local shepherd and he was told that they were Wotan’s army of departed souls, who would  sometimes appear to lonesome travellers.

Jung is also reminded of another historical parallel,  the Reislaüfer, a mercenary army of young Swiss men who usually gathered each spring before  marching from central Switzerland to Italy, with singing and jolly bidding farewell to their  native land. Jung thought he might have witnessed one of these past gatherings, hinting at  synchronicity as a possible explanation. Jung recalls an incident where he  recounted the life of a man at a dinner, without knowing him.

He unwittingly gave an  exemplary account of an imaginary criminal, which happened to be the exact description of the  life of the man sitting opposite him. Jung writes: “I too have this archaic nature, and in me it is  linked with the gift—not always pleasant—of seeing people and things as they are. I can let myself  be deceived from here to Tipperary when I don’t want to recognise something, and yet at bottom I  know quite well how matters really stand.

In this I am like a dog – he can be tricked but he always  smells it out in the end. This ‘insight’ is based on instinct, or on a participation mystique with  others. It is as if the ‘eyes of the background’ do the seeing in an impersonal act of perception.

” In 1927, Jung’s friend H. died. Half a year before, Jung dreamt that he was travelling with  him by car in the direction of Luxor on the East bank of the river Nile.

On the opposite side,  is the Theban Necropolis, the City of the Dead. A few weeks later after the death of H. – Jung  had another dream: they were now in Luxor in a restaurant.

H. told him with great emotion,  “You know that I’m alive. There’s no need for you to imagine I am dead.

I am as alive as  you! ” He then got threateningly close and Jung was overwhelmed by the smell of rotting cadaver,  and he kept himself at a distance with a machete. After the funeral, Jung saw a vision in which H. 

was standing at the foot of his bed and wanted Jung to follow him. H. then led him to his  study and pointed to several books with red covers on a high bookshelf.

A few days later, Jung  asked H’s widow if he could look in his study, and he saw a book entitled The Legacy of the Dead. Jung tells the case of a man whom he pulled out of a depression. But his wife was jealous because  of Jung’s influence over him.

Jung had an uneasy feeling about her. Nevertheless, the man went  back home and married, but his wife did not care for him and placed a tremendous burden which  he was incapable of coping with. After a year, he relapsed into a new depression.

Jung had told  the man to get in touch with him if his condition worsened. But he did not do so, because of his  wife’s influence. After delivering a lecture, Jung returned to his hotel around midnight.

He  woke up at around two o’clock, with the feeling that someone had come into the room. But there was  nobody. Then he realised that he had a dull pain, on his forehead and the back of his skull. 

The following day, he got the news that his patient had shot himself, the bullet had come to  rest in the back of the skull. This experience was a genuine synchronistic phenomenon such as  is quite often observed in connection with an archetypal situation — in this case, death. Archetypes can also appear as a real outer object which behaves as if it were motivated or  evoked by, or as if it were expressing, a thought corresponding to the archetype.

Such as Jung’s  famous synchronicity involving a scarab beetle. Jung had a hard time with his patient who was  extremely rational and did not believe anything about the unconscious. At the moment his patient  was telling him about her golden scarab dream, a real scarab tried to get into the room, as  if it had understood that it must play its mythological role as a symbol of rebirth.

When  he handed it over to her, it finally broke the ice of her intellectual resistance, and helped  her get in touch with her inner world. It is as if the unconscious knew about this imbalance  and sought to compensate her behaviour with a real-life event through a meaningful coincidence. The language of religion calls these happenings “God’s will” quite correctly.

Jung writes: “The situation may be indicative of illness or danger to life, for instance. Consciousness feels  such a situation to be overwhelming in so far as it knows no way of meeting with it effectively.  In this predicament, even people who can boast of no particular religious belief find themselves  compelled by fear to utter a fervent prayer: the archetype of a ‘helpful divine being’  is being constellated by their submission and may actually intervene… producing at the last  moment a turn in the threatening situation which is felt to be miraculous.

Such crises have  occurred countless times in human history. ” In many situations we must call on instinct  because our reason fails. Instinct appears in myths and in dreams as the motif of the helpful  animal, the guardian spirit, the good angel, the helper in need, the saint, saviour, etc. 

God is nearest where the need is greatest. Thus, synchronistic phenomena occur for the most part in emotional situations; for instance, in cases of death, sickness, accidents, and so on. During psychotherapy, one observes them relatively frequently at moments of heightened emotional tension such as fear, anger, sorrow, etc.

(patterns which appear as archetypal motifs in dreams). The majority of synchronistic phenomena thus occur in archetypal situations and they manifest themselves in the form of telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and so on. In 1960, a year prior to his death, Jung writes: “Paranormal psychic phenomena have interested me all my life.

Usually, as I have said, they occur in acute psychological states (emotionality, depression, shock, etc. ), or, more frequently, with individuals characterised by a peculiar or pathological personality structure, where the threshold to the collective unconscious is habitually lowered. People with a creative genius also belong to this type.

” It is clear that Jung was himself such a creative person with a lower threshold to the collective unconscious. If we look back into the past history of mankind, we find a universal belief in the existence of phantoms or ethereal beings who dwell among us and exercise an invisible yet powerful influence upon us. These beings are generally supposed to be the spirits or the souls of the dead.

In the West, however, belief in spirits has been counteracted by the Age of Enlightenment, so that among the majority of educated people it has been supressed along with other metaphysical beliefs. Jung noticed, however, that in this age of materialism—the inevitable consequence of rationalistic enlightenment—there has been a revival of the belief in spirits, but this time on a higher level. It is not a relapse into the darkness of superstition, but an intense scientific interest in the spiritual.

Jung writes: “Rationalism and superstition are complementary. It is a psychological rule that the brighter the light, the blacker the shadow; in other words, the more rationalistic we are in our conscious minds, the more alive becomes the spectral world of the unconscious. And it is indeed obvious that rationality is in large measure an apotropaic defence against superstition, which is ever-present and unavoidable.

” Many supernatural phenomena cannot be explained scientifically, which does not imply that they are false or nonsense. Only a prejudiced and one-sided materialistic mind would think so. They are simply unknown.

This is one of the running themes in Jung’s work, the problematic nature of the modern materialistic zeitgeist, which prides itself in having overcome irrationalism whilst being totally unaware of the irrationalism of a blind faith in absolute reason. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Jung writes about the psychological foundations of belief in spirits. He explains how primitive man refers to loss of soul as a sickness, both mental and physical, while the influence of spirits is seen as uncanny or dangerous, and one is greatly relieved when they are banished.

“Thus, for the primitive, the soul is something that seems normally to belong to him, but spirits seem to be something that normally should not be near him. He avoids places haunted by spirits, or visits them only with fear, for religious or magical purposes. ” It is important to note that Jung has an entirely positive understanding of “primitive man”, who is still in touch with the forces of nature that Western (urban) man has lost, primarily as a result of processes of modernisation.

Primitive man recognises two causes of illness: loss of soul, and possession by a spirit. Jung calls the former soul-complexes which belong to the ego and the loss of them appears pathological. The opposite is true of spirit-complexes: their association with the ego causes illness, and their dissociation from it brings recovery.

These correspond exactly to Jung’s conception of the unconscious. The soul is explained in terms of complexes of the personal unconscious, while seemingly autonomous spirits are explained in terms of complexes of the collective unconscious (or archetypes). The reintegration of a complex is often healing, whereas the invasion of an archetype is a dangerous phenomenon.

Jung had studied a wide range of spiritualistic literature popular in his time and had come to the conclusion that spiritualism as a collective phenomenon pursues the same goals of analytical psychology. The psychotherapeutic endeavours of the spirits are aimed at the living either directly, or indirectly through the deceased person, in order to make them more conscious. Thus, the teachings of the spirits are characteristic of the nature of the collective unconscious.

Science is simply a matter of intellect, which is one among several fundamental psychic functions and therefore does not suffice to give a complete picture of the world. For this another function—feeling—is needed too. Feeling often arrives at convictions that are different from those of the intellect, and which are not necessarily inferior.

So, we have every reason to grant our intellect only a limited validity. But when we work with the intellect, we must proceed scientifically until one is presented with irrefutable evidence. During the first half of his career, Jung was not as interested in the question “do ghosts really exist?

” but rather, “who is it that sees a ghost? ” “Under what psychic conditions does one see it? ” “What does a ghost signify when examined for its content as a symbol?

” To Jung, what mattered was the reality of the experience, and in this, he took his patients very seriously. Jung described spirits as “the exteriorised effects of unconscious complexes”, and stated, “I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming, I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology. ” Many years later, however, Jung’s opinion changed.

He writes: “After collecting psychological experiences from many people and many countries for fifty years, I no longer feel as certain as I did in 1919, when I wrote this sentence. To put it bluntly, I doubt whether an exclusively psychological approach can do justice to the phenomena in question. Not only the findings of parapsychology, but my own theoretical reflections, outlined in “On the Nature of the Psyche”, have led me to certain postulates which touch on the realm of nuclear physics and the conception of the space-time continuum.

This opens up the whole question of the transpsychic reality immediately underlying the psyche. ” Though often used interchangeably, we may draw a subtle difference between ghosts and spirits. Ghosts can be seen as imprints of energy or after-images tied to a space.

They seem to have unfinished business on earth, hence their strong ties to a certain place. Often times they are not aware that they are dead, and their death is usually a tragic or violent one. A ghost is a lingering presence of a dead person, and is associated with hauntings.

Spirits, on the other hand, can be described as souls of humans and other sentient beings like animals who have died and have moved on to a spiritual realm. They are conscious and active. In a foreword to Stewart Edward White’s The Unobstructed Universe, Jung writes: “[O]ur world of consciousness and the “Beyond” together form a single cosmos, with the result that the dead are not in a different place from the living.

There is only a difference in their “frequencies”, which might be likened to the revolutions of a propeller: at low speeds the blades are visible, but at high speeds they disappear. In psychological terms this would mean that the conscious and the unconscious psyche are one, but are separated by different amounts of energy… the “Beyond” is this same cosmos but without the limitations imposed on mortal man by space and time. Hence it is called “the unobstructed universe.

” Our world is contained in this higher order and owes its existence principally to the fact that the corporeal man has a low “frequency”, thanks to which the limiting factors of space and time become operative. The world without limitations is called “Orthos”, which means the “right” or “true” world… though it must be emphasised that this does not imply a devaluation of our world… this limited life should be lived as fully as possibly, because the attainment of maximum consciousness while in this world is an essential condition for the coming life in “Orthos” … [this is in agreement with Plato] who regarded philosophy as a preparation for death. ” Even though our critical arguments may cast doubt on every single case, there is not a single argument that could prove that spirits do not exist.

In this regard, therefore, we must rest content with the mystery. Jung writes: “Those who are not convinced should beware of naively assuming that the whole question of spirits and ghosts has been settled and that all manifestations of this kind are meaningless swindles. This is not so at all.

These phenomena exist in their own right, regardless of the way they are interpreted, and it is beyond all doubt that they are genuine manifestations of the unconscious. The communications of “spirits” are statements about the unconscious psyche, provided that they are really spontaneous and are not cooked up by the conscious mind. ” Having considered the phenomenon of the paranormal from different angles, Jung did not reach a resolution of his analysis of the subject.

Towards the end of his life, he wrote: “I myself cannot brag about any original research in this field, but declare without hesitation that I was able to witness enough of these phenomena to be wholly convinced that they are real. However, I cannot explain them, and hence cannot decide on any of the usual interpretations. ” At the end, Jung also admits that paranormal phenomena could be better explained by the hypothesis of spirits than by the qualities and peculiarities of the unconscious.

So, they are likely both spiritual and physic in nature. The statements and incidents scattered throughout his work show that the paranormal was deeply linked to his overall worldview and understanding of the psyche. For Jung, things were complex because he remained open to ideas that challenged the scientific views of his time.

For them, the question was resolved; for Jung, it was not, and he laboured continually to navigate around conflicting worldviews—a true alchemical work of uniting the opposites. Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious was difficult to overcome, but this experience was the most important of his life. Indeed, he felt that it was enough for several lifetimes.

As Jung stated when asked if he believed in God: “I don’t need to believe, I know. ” He experienced gnosis. It is the inner visions and images that made him truly whole, and give him the foundation to share his gifts to the world.

"Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience.